“Having boyfriends and girlfriends has become a fashion in cities. This is why incidence of rapes is higher in urban areas compared to rural parts of the country,” he added. [With boyfriend? Abu Azmi’s out to get you.]

So how does Abu Azmi suggest we ensure girls who are with their boy friends are not assaulted by criminals, rapists, molesters or various Indian-Taliban-like senas? Efficient police? Better transport services after dark? Increased patrolling? Better lit roads? Fast track courts to ensure law of the land is respected and feared?

Sadly, no. He doesn’t even seem to be aware that Indian women have the legal right to choose their partners and husbands; or that rapists and non-women do not have the right to put a system in place to prevent women from accessing public spaces before or after dark, with or without a non-woman. Here’s what he has to say.

“Girls should not be out with their boyfriends when it is late in the night. A system is needed to keep in check such behaviour.”

Are the rapists and molesters, a ‘system in place’ to ensure women ‘roam’ only with their family members? Does he really believe that rapists do not rape women who are with their brothers, or husbands or parents?

And if Abu Azmi ever read newspapers, he would know that boyfriends, jeans or mobiles do not cause sexual assaults; patriarchal mindsets and misogyny do.

“I don’t know how my daughter reached Dalbir’s room. I raised an alarm after I saw her coming out of his room crying and her clothes stained with blood oozing out of her private parts… reached Dalbir’s room but he was nowhere to be found…” said the victim’s mother.

“My father-in-law Suresh would come home on the pretext of having tea and would rape me. I informed my mother-in-law but instead of helping me she warned me against revealing it to anyone. Encouraged by this, my father-in-law kept on raping me and even my husband turned a blind eye. My brother came to take me home in December and it was then that I shared my plight with my family,” said the victim.

The victim’s family had taken the matter to a local panchayat in Hisar and got Suresh to face the panchayat. He reportedly admitted to his folly and promised not to repeat it. He offered to take the victim back to Gurgaon and raped her en route.

The woman allegedly called up her family on Monday to inform them and they in turn reported the matter to the Sector 5 police station.

So while Azmi etc worry about ‘misuse’ of rape laws, one panchayat in Hisar lets off a rapist with a ‘promise not to repeat it’, another panchayat there has banned jeans and mobiles for girls to prevent rapists from raping. [Link] Doesn’t make sense? Remember they think rape is loss of virginity.

When they ban women from interacting with men and when they ban cell phones, what exactly are they banning?

How do Abu Azmi and the likes of him define rape? How do they hope to prevent sexual assaults on women and children by preventing women from choosing who they live with, marry or divorce?

Seriously I can’t take this anymore. These kind of statements and non-stop reports of rape are driving me crazy…I can’t believe this is happening. Please tell me it is not true that those 6 men after admitting to their crime before the police will now plead not guilty before the court and will get a trial and their lawyer actually is proposing to put the blame on the girl and her boyfriend for encouraging these men to act brutally. Is this lawyer for real? I can’t believe the old, wise and educated class of our country is so disconnected from truth and justice, fairness and equality. These gurus and leaders seem like drunk men roaming in the dark, senseless, out of mind, wild and dangerous leading others to doom !! One can still punish criminals…but what do you do with such idiots.

“The lawyer representing three of the men charged with the gang rape and murder of a medical student aboard a moving bus in New Delhi has blamed the victims for the assault, saying he has never heard of a “respected lady” being raped in India.
[…]
Manohar Lal Sharma said his clients will plead not guilty to all charges today when they make their next court appearance.
[…]
Sharma said the male companion of the murdered 23-year-old was “wholly responsible” for the incident as the unmarried couple should not have been on the streets at night.
“Until today I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” Sharma said in an interview at a cafe outside the Supreme Court in India’s capital. “Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl with respect.”

The lawyer is making a terrible defence, which is not a defence at all. I won’t be surprised if it is staged just for the sake of appearance, that the ‘accused’ are getting lawyers and their voices heard for a fair trial.

Not very long ago defense attorneys blamed the victims for getting raped, even in the US. It was the Chery Araujo trial that changed it. Now most defense attorneys only try to prove that sex was consensual.

I would not totally blame their lawyer though. A lawyer’s job is to represent his client to the best of his ability. I also wouldn’t worry too much about the “respectable women don’t get raped defense” that Mr.Defense here is offering because any prosecutor worth his salt will tear through it.

Having said that I am still shaking my head reading some of the comments that these so called leaders make. How can they make India a superpower and have her compete and overtake other countries when they have no idea of what’s happening around the world and how the world has changed.

Well, as far as India is concerned, the case that put paid to the most common and previously valid form of victim blaming (insinuating that the victim was ‘habituated to intercourse’) as a means of exonerating a defendant was State of Maharashtra and another v. Madhukar Narayan Mardikar, AIR 1991 SC 207.

I’m not casting aspersions, but it’s just a bit hard for me to imagine any lawyer attempting to exonerate a defendant on the basis of an argument as meaningless (and legally invalid) as the one being touted here. Considering the obvious resistance put up by the victim, the extent of her injuries, and the presence of an actual witness who was beaten up as well, this is the closest thing you’d get to an open-and-shut case in real life. As far as I knew, the general consensus was that they’d either plead guilty or utilize an argument that runs along the lines of ‘we were provoked, and lost control’ (which sadly still works in India from time to time.
I was certainly not expecting the defense lawyer to claim that she wasn’t ‘respectable’, which makes the rape excusable. That’s the kind of junk you’d expect from a none too bright first year law student, not an actual practicing advocate.

In any case, while they do have a right to use whatever defense they want, logical or illogical, I sincerely doubt that the defense part would get even close to establishing exonerating conditions.

India seems to have no dearth of talent for people wanting to make a complete fool of themselves on a national scale. Be it Abu Azmi, Asaram, Abhijit Mukherji, Anisur Rehman, Anita Shukla, Vijayvargiya, the Khaps or several others, all of them wait for an opportunity to showcase their stupidity. Or maybe they see it as a chance at cheap publicity. But whatever the case, sadly we can do nothing but bang our heads listening to such crap. It is their right to freedom of speech. Is it not??

oh please.. its time such people should be booked for what they utter. as it is, freedom of speech is not absolute. at least not in india. or else the next you’ll argue that the owaisi guy was using his right of freedom of speech too.

I wonder what exactly has inspired this mass breakout of victim-blaming, sexist and misogynist comments by people all over the country. Why the hell are we having this terrible and disgusting “battle of wits”?

I wonder why it’s always the women in the spotlight! Why do we never ask questions about what makes rapists think they have the right to rape, or to harass; why do we never look at what a rapist’s wearing when he attacks a woman, why do we never demand that men change their behaviour, their attitudes, their habits; why do we never shame, shun and ostracise rapists the way we shame, shun and ostracize the raped; why the hell do we never questions the rapists’ morality, their character?

Such statements not only perpetuate harmful ideas and attitudes, they also help perpetuate violence against women by making the abuser’s actions seem acceptable. These useless and problematic measures that are often proposed shift the burden of blame from the assailant to the victim. They direct attention to the victim’s behaviour and away from the offender’s actions, thereby absolving the assailant of his responsibility for the attack.They disqualify the insidious nature and acceptance of violence towards women. Moreover, these statements do immense disservice to all suffering women who might otherwise consider coming forward against their attackers.

You are reeking of western culture, my friend LOL.
Let me clarify a few things: The educated urban stance on rape, and on the larger issue of women empowerment is indeed a western concept; as in what has developed in the west particularly in the twentieth century with women’s suffrage, right to education, etc. coming into force.
[This was in fact preceded by the more important Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_Women%27s_Property_Act_1882). Do I even need to emphasise that no law however eloquently written can be implemented unless people have the money and means to test it. No wonder that English women had to have a taste of the “right to property” before they realised how they were thwarted in other ways by a misogynistic and deeply unequal society.]
The reason we still have these Abu Azmi and Asaram bapu type trolls pandering (they’re really popular, mid you) to our desi audience is that we have not had that kind of evolution in our legal system. Mr. Ambedkar did well to borrow the western concept of women’s suffrage and include it in the constitution, but it’s a top down strategy, as against the bottom-up “movement” that spurred western countries to amend their laws into becoming more gender-inclusive than they were a century ago.
What I mean by that is, simply, we are in fact a misogynistic society governed by the questionable intelligence of the writers of the Manu Samhita and Sharia type of literature. Both define women as givers of pleasure, keepers of hearth and home; and objects that can be traded or abused as symbols of “family honour”.
Only education and propaganda can change deeply ingrained values enshrined in these texts and followed by millions. And if you try to do that, they will (and, somewhat correctly) point out that we’re western-culture imbued infidel worthy only to be put in place by their vigilantes.
And the more we try, the more we get branded. In my family, which is otherwise extremely liberal, I have been regularly branded as irreligious (which I am) and a Christian (which I definitely am NOT) for my views. In my husband’s family, I’m still looked on as an anomaly😛
And I’m completely happy – the educated, irreligious, shameless, opinionated, hard-working, wine-drinking, jean-wearing western whatever.

Jezebel has weighed in too and is worth reading just for the comments.
Anyway, Azmi’s son(aka Ayesha Takia’s husband) apologised ‘on behalf of’- but if Azmi is truly sorry, HE should be the one saying so!

this is just so sick… What happened to the brave delhi girl was just so brutal and so inhuman and unfair..and to top it, these (insert the worst word possible) are making things even painful. Sometimes I just lose faith in humanity and feel so helpless😦

Comments like this just make me go crazy.
Its like nothing makes any sense to them. The brutality of the crime, the lack of safety in the country, the “devil may care” attitude of these hounds, nothing. They are actually blaming the victim!
I just feel they’re wired so wrong! They need a serious brain check-up.

Reading stuff like this gives me an itching in the fingers to seriously hurt such self-righteous morons. Luckily I have learned to control my urges and know better than to act on every violent thought I have or every “provocation” that comes my way. Unlike the beasts this lawyer is going to defend.

I’d like to share another Insensitive remark by an MP:
“The rape of grown-up girls and women might be understandable but if someone does this to an infant, it is a heinous crime and the offenders should be hanged (barabari ya bade logo ke sath balatkar samajh me ata hai, lekin nabalig bachhiyo ke sath is tarah ka jaghanya apradh karma. Inko to fasi par latka dena chahiye)”, BJP MP Ramesh Bais told reporters referring to the rape case involving minor inmates of a government-run residential school in Kanker district of the state.

How the hell is rape of grown up girls and women understandable? Is it because the society at large thinks that rape is about lust and momentary loss of control, an act that is often provoked by the victim? The voyeuristic narrative of of rape as an expression of erotic impulses, simmering sexual urges and as a propensity of man is disturbing at least to me.

As amit pointed out there seems to be a “competition going on for the biggest scum of a human”.

In a weird way, such openly despicable comments from such morally bankrupt people serve an unintended purpose. Without such outrageous comments keeping the flame of public anger alive, most people would have started pushing Nirbhaya’s ordeal to the back of their minds. As it is, each day and each comment keeps bringing up painful reminders of what happened…which is what our society needs. I prefer our so-called leaders to make such transparent comments so that we know where they (and their supporters) stand instead of these leaders mouthing politically correct platitudes and lulling us into a false sense of security. There is a public dialog that has been triggered and we are going to hear such comments again and again. On the flip side, there are also some positive comments coming out that, unfortunately, do not get the same airtime as the negative comments.

This was one such comment from an unexpected source. I have seen a couple of his sermons on youtube and found it to be very unimpressive, not to mention irritatingly fuzzy and vague. But, given his public following, this particular comment was heartening to read.

I didn’t know who he was, and first had to go look him up. But his comments weren’t all that surprising, which makes me so sad that I have become so habituated to moronic statements by people in power that it doesn’t even make me angry anymore.

The one thing that did make me wonder was, well, how exactly do the potential rapists, or people who are to “keep such behaviour in check” know if the man that a woman is with is her husband, brother or boyfriend? I mean I would think that without obvious public displays of affection, this would not be clear to anyone. (rolls eyes) Anyway, I’ve stopped expecting logically sound arguments form politician.

But, Satish’s point about such statements is valid in a sense, because at least with such open abhorrent remarks, we know exactly where these people stand, and if the content of the statements serve to fuel the public anger, then maybe there will be some good coming out of them after all.